


All Our Yesterdays

by CluelessKitten



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, The Avengers - Ambiguous Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Character Death, Data dumps don't distinguish between the sinners and the saints, Gen, Not Beta Read, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Slight OOC
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-17
Updated: 2019-09-17
Packaged: 2020-10-20 12:03:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,695
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20675090
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CluelessKitten/pseuds/CluelessKitten
Summary: Clint can't wait to come back home.





	All Our Yesterdays

,

,

,

The end of the world happens like this.

Clint is deep undercover and counting down the days until he can go home. Laura’s goodbye kiss is an echo on his lips, and he wants to hug his kids again. It’s been weeks; he hopes the pregnancy isn’t giving Laura too much around the farm. He promised he’d be around for those months, but the mission extended far past everyone’s expectations, and he’s still here.

He’ll take some leave once this is over. Visit New York with the family for once, let Laura and the kids meet Tony Stark – she’s always talking about meeting his coworkers. And who knows? Maybe he can talk Nat into coming with them. It would give Laura a much-needed break, and the kids would love a change of scenery.

Alarms set off in his head as soon as he enters the pre-established safehouse. The lights are out, for one thing. The air is too still, and a thread of electricity shoots down his spine.

The bullet grazes the tip of his ear as he throws himself to the floor and rolls sideways.

,

His handler is dead and all attempts to contact SHIELD are a bust. This has happened before; there are procedures in case of extreme emergencies, but the pieces aren’t falling together for Clint the way they usually do – mostly because there seems to be none in the first place. When the hell did his cover even get blown? _How?_

Clint is running, running, running – a government agent in a foreign country with no way to get home. Enemies turn up wherever he goes, and he’s starting to wear thin. Emergency funds won’t last much longer, either. SHIELD has a standard SOP for this sort of thing, but Nat and Cap are silent – and he doesn’t know how to contact Bruce or Thor, either.

He escapes to an old phone booth outside a diner and, in his desperation, calls the local Stark Industries branch.

This is not standard procedure; this is not precedented, but neither was taking in the Red Room girl he was supposed to hunt down. Tony is a consultant, though, and Clint is calling up a foreign branch. He doesn’t know how this will end, only that he can’t keep running for much longer.

Almost an hour later, Iron Man touches down and collects Hawkeye.

Being carried like a princess back to Stark Tower isn’t exactly a dream come true – the sight of New York City still runs a sliver of unease inside Clint – but he’s grateful all the same.

Gratefulness morphs into worry, however, when Tony leads him into some of the residential floors, and he – he fucking recognizes most, if not all, of the faces apparently living there. Once Tony’s left with a promise to send up amenities and have a bed set up for him in a few hours, the false calm dissipates and he rounds on them with all the hostility of a cornered animal.

“What the fuck is going on here?” he asks, and it’s so easy to make fear sound like anger. “Where’s Fury?”

SHIELD, they tell him, is gone, and Fury went along with it. Maria Hill is with Tony at the moment – not in the physical sense, but they’ve been working together to extract compromised agents from the field.

“We all thought you were dead,” someone says. “At least sixty-five percent of extractions by now is just rescuing another corpse to bury respectfully.”

_Compromised agents?_ He asks. _Extractions?_

They stare at him.

“Didn’t you hear?” they say. “Don’t you know what _Captain America_ and _Black Widow_ have done?”

No.

“They betrayed us.”

“They released all our files.”

“Everyone and their mother knows about every single thing SHIELD has done now, and everyone affiliated with it.”

_No_.

Laura. Cooper. Lila.

Fear lodges in Clint’s throat. “Where’s my family?”

A hush falls in the room.

“Where. Is. My family?”

No one answers him.

,

The room is cold and smells strongly of disinfectant. After a life in the circus, then as a semi-successful mercenary, the scent has always struck him as highly unnatural like blood spatter on fresh snow.

He doesn’t turn around when he hears the door hiss open and then shut. The click-clack of expensive shoes. Breathing, fabric, and the kind of expensive men’s cologne Clint never let Laura buy for him because he’s a simple man even if his hazard pay is a thing of beauty.

(She gave him a bottle anyway, on their first wedding anniversary. It sits in its expensive little box tucked safely into his side of their dresser, and he only puts it on for date nights and their special occasions.

Well. It used to be there, at least.)

“I’m sorry.”

He does turn around then, and his puffy, red, aching eyes fall on Tony’s haggard form. He wants to say, _sorry for what_ but he’s read SHIELD’s file. The guy has a guilt complex so wide and so deep he’d probably let Clint punch him if he tried. And Clint wants to punch something, wants to shoot something, to scream and lose control and never resurface.

“It’s not your fault,” he says instead. He imagines Laura’s soft smile, her patience in the face of his frustration after a bad mission, the safe haven he found in her arms.

Her eyes stare blankly at the ceiling, her body pale on the metal slab with only a sheet to protect her dignity. Their children are still shelved away on their own slabs; he doesn’t have the strength to look at them yet.

_Be safe, sweetie._

_I love you, Dad!_

_Bye, Dad!_

“Clint, I–”

“Don’t,” he cuts in sharply, leaving Tony’s jaw open but soundless before it clicks shut. “Don’t take the blame here. Just – _no._”

Because he knows who to blame, and if there’s anything Laura has taught him over the years, it’s that he’s better than hitting an innocent man. Especially not an innocent man who saved his life.

“Where are they?” he asks, voice still hushed because his wife is here, and he swore a long time ago that she would never see that side of him. “Tony, where are Nat and Steve?”

“I don’t know. They haven’t surfaced in weeks.” Tony looks uncertain as he adds, “They’ll be put on trial once they’re found.”

Clint nods once, swallowing the white-hot rage down his chest. "The US government won't be the only ones they'll have to face once they're found."

He turns back one final time, kisses the back of Laura’s hand, the wedding ring, and tells her he’ll visit soon. He closes her blank eyes and pulls the sheet over her face. Claps Tony on the shoulder on the way out of the morgue. He’ll break down in the elevator, he’ll break down in the gym. He’ll even break down in front of whatever ex-SHIELD roommate he’s been assigned to if that's what it comes to because God knows Tony has space, but _not enough to house over half of SHIELD’s employees_.

But not in front of his family. Never his family.

“I’ll help Hill locate the remaining agents,” he says tiredly, clapping Tony on the shoulder in what he hopes conveys the gratefulness he can’t quite bring himself to give words to right now. “You go take a break. Take a Kitkat or whatever.”

“What? No, there’s too much to do–”

“And you look like shit, man. Come on, you’re not gonna help anyone if you’re too tired to move.” When Tony hesitates, Clint lowers his voice a bit, makes it into something less hollowly cavalier. “These are our agents, Stark. And we might’ve been shit at it so far, but it’s time to get off our asses and look after our own. We’ll call you if something unusual comes up,” he adds, and Tony’s shoulders finally slump.

He looks so much older at that moment, and Clint sharply remembers that, in his forties, Tony is one of the oldest Avengers. SHIELD agents are usually retired, dead, or promoted to deskwork by the time they’re Tony’s age, and here the guy is, going out and rescuing their sorry necks at all hours of the day while running a goddamn business.

They exit the floor, and Clint sends him a sideway glance. The guy still looks devastated.

He feels Laura’s warm strength, a strength more solid and more real than he’s ever felt of himself, and he clears his throat. He pushes the words out, one at a time, to tell him, roughly, “Thanks. For rescuing us.”

The reply is soft. Bitter. “I should’ve done more.”

And Clint shakes his head. “Steve and Nat should have done better. And they didn’t. That’s not your fault. So, go rest,” he says as the elevator opens to his floor. “We’ve got it from here.”

He doesn’t believe for a second that Tony will actually be able to fall asleep with this hanging over his head, but Clint has said his piece. Managed to tell him something real without blowing up or melting down.

Laura would’ve been proud.

The elevator closes behind him, and he turns to the agents milling about, some with their families, other alone with a somewhat vacant look in their eyes. Maria Hill stands in the center of the communal living area. Their eyes meet unflinchingly, and she nods to him before turning back to the motley crowd. He squares his shoulders and steps forward to hear her better.

“Listen up, people,” she says with all the authority they’re familiar with. “Captain America and Black Widow may have decided that SHIELD was too far gone to salvage, but we still have good agents in the field who’ve been compromised and need our help. With Stark’s resources and our own analysts, we’ve managed to compile a list of names and locations where we can find some of our men.

“Stark works hard and fast, but he can’t do this alone,” she adds clearly before anyone can speak. “Most of you have just recently been extracted, but SHIELD needs you one last time. Your colleagues and friends need you.

“So, let’s bring them home.”

,

,

,

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not used to writing characters like Clint, who are usually portrayed as impulsive with a whole lot of 'fight me'. So, I'm not sure if I stayed true to the character, but I really wanted to write him as someone less destructively childish, someone a person like Laura (at least, as she was portrayed in the movie) would have married. Or at least to write him in a way that at least makes more sense to me than the Clint Barton we got in CW.
> 
> Also, I'm not good at writing speeches, but I couldn't find a way around writing Maria Hill's. Oh, well...


End file.
